Super Nt to be released with Director’s Cut of Super Turrican

Following on from our story last week of the Super Nt release (abridged version: a FPGA SNES with a high degree of build quality) it’s been announced that every console sold will also come preloaded with a director’s cut of Super Turrican as well as its sequel, Super Turrican II: The Final Fight.

Originally developed by Factor 5 in 1993, it turns out that the version you know and love is actually a condensed release of what was intended. The story goes that even though the game was developed with a 6Mbit cartridge in mind, the publisher, Seika Corp, cheaped out and instead insisted on a smaller but more cost efficient 4Mbit cartridge. This resulted in a truncated version that was missing an entire level as well as music and graphics.

Fast-forward to 2008 and the full version was again intended to be released to the public. The idea was that if Super Turrican and Mega Turrican were purchased from the Wii’s Virtual Console, the director’s cut would be included as a free bonus. However, Nintendo had a rather silly policy at the time that prevented anything not previously commercially released to be sold on their store, thwarting the release yet again.

Luckily, through a partnership with Analogue (the Super Nt’s manufacturer), the developer can finally release a version of Super Turrican that was intended over 24 years ago. This version will include new music, sound, graphics and enemies – but most importantly, that fabled lost level. This level includes a mechanic with the Freeze Beam weapon that’s not seen anywhere else in the game. The player actually unfreezes the enemies in order to progress through the level, which is a nice twist. It also explains why the game feels like it ended so suddenly originally – this is the actual intended final level.

This was all announced through a particular brutally edited video on Analogue’s Vimeo (I assume the editor was watching too many late-90’s electronica music videos the night before) and while it doesn’t come as a physical release, a collectable SNES inspired cardboard box is included. There’s still no word yet on if it’s going to released externally or not, though.

Growing up while the fifth generation of consoles reigned supreme meant that Brendan missed out on much of the 80’s and early 90’s of gaming the first time around. He either lacked the cognitive ability to play them, as naturally, he was a baby - or he simply didn’t exist yet. Undeterred, Brendan started a blog called Retro Game On in 2011. This followed his exploits as he collected and played everything he could get his hands on no matter what the release date.
While RGO is mainly YouTube focused these days concentrating on video reviews and historical features, the itch to do some old fashion writing never went away. More recently, Brendan has been a staff writer for the gaming website, GameCloud, mostly focusing on the indie gaming scene in his locale of Perth, Australia.